Fremont City Council voted unanimously at its meeting Tuesday to approve a $300,000 transfer to fund Fremont Police Department’s Community-Based Camera Project, which would require the installation of security cameras and license plate readers at major arteries in and out of the city.

The council heard from Fremont Police Chief Richard Lucero, residents opposed to installing surveillance cameras and some who came in support of the idea to deter criminals and allow the police department to use partial descriptions from investigations to search for more information.

The police department had returned to council this week after the council last October denied the department $161,000 in Community Development Block Grant funds to install surveillance cameras in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

After heated discussion about privacy concerns from residents then, council members shared their unease with using funds intended to help the city’s impoverished although they all agreed video cameras could improve public safety.

In order to address those concerns, Fremont City Manager Fred Diaz suggested the council revisit the issue in February, when Diaz could use mid-year predictions to see if the funds could be found for the cameras elsewhere.

Lucero on Tuesday reiterated what he said in October — these surveillance cameras and license plate readers would allow police to look further into cases that normally do not have witnesses — like burglaries — that often go unsolved.

Saying 250 private surveillance systems are already registered in Fremont with the police department, Lucero asserted that many neighborhoods pooled together to purchase a surveillance camera for their area, and that the department will often ask for access to this surveillance footage to help with investigations whenever possible.

The $300,000 community-based camera project is intended to expand the network of cameras that would be utilized and controlled by the police department.

“The purpose is to place high resolution cameras and license plate readers at onramps and on surface streets on routes of departure out of the city. And the reason we are concentrating on those is because of our recognition of the mobile nature of the modern offender and because our statistical understanding of the number of offenders that are active in our community and that enter our jurisdiction from other cities,” Lucero said at Tuesday’s meeting.

Based on burglary convictions with a disposition in 2013, 79 percent of defendants were from cities outside of Fremont, added Lt. John Lu during the presentation.

“The way we will utilize the program is very straightforward, under criminal investigations where we are provided some type description or some specific information about the specific suspect then we can review the video and see if there are any subjects that match that description and that provides the basis for an investigation, but perhaps more consequentially when we don’t have that information this also gives us a powerful tool to address those situations as well. For example, in circumstances when we have more than one residential burglary or more than one robbery, we would survey the data and look for commonalities in the license plate information and use that as a pointer to begin a criminal investigation,” Lucero said.

He said by doing this he hoped to impact serial offenders. He added the police department was very cognizant of the privacy issues that were being brought up and said they were striving to balance the privacy of the citizens of Fremont against the usefulness of the information.

“First, if you are considering where the cameras are being proposed for placement which is basically onramps, so it’s not locations that are considered to be of high sensitivity. But secondly we have tried to strike a reasonable level of retention practice for the information we would hope to be able to gather and by that I mean that the video images would be retained for 30 days and license plate data would be retained for one year through our cooperative effort with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center and the only time we would depart from that retention schedule is on occasions when the evidence ended up being introduced in a specific criminal investigation and on those occasions the information would be maintained for as long as the appellate life of the case continues,” Lucero said.

Three speakers at the meeting said they oppose the camera systems because of concerns about personal privacy.

“The council must adopt enforceable safeguards to prevent and address misuse,” ACLU spokesman Mike Chase said, calling for council members to consider “the potential costs to taxpayers and community members’ rights.”

Aliyah Mohammed covers local government, education, breaking news and community issues in Milpitas and Fremont. She is also the web and social media coordinator for the Milpitas Post and Fremont Argus. Aliyah has been working for Bay Area News Group since 2013. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a double bachelors in English and media studies in 2013. Aliyah loves coffee, traveling, soccer and being a devoted bibliophile.

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